Overview

An estimated 200,000 Latvian soldiersDLten percent of the total prewar population of LatviaDL served on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Since the Republic of Latvia had been occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, then occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, these soldiers did not serve in in the Latvian Army. Instead, they served in Soviet and German uniform, primarily in Latvian national formations in the Soviet Union>'s Red Army (in its final form, the 130th Latvian Rifle Corps) and Nazi Germany>'s Waffen SS (ultimately, the VI SS Army Corps (Latvian), more colloquially known as the Latvian Legion). After the war, parallel political movements led by front-line veterans emerged: a network of anti-communist Cold War Latvian activists in the West and a National Communist political faction that pushed the boundaries of the post-Stalin thaw in 1950s Soviet Latvia.Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service traces the origins, wartime experience, and legacies of soldiers from Latvia who fought in national formations on both sides of the Eastern Front. Through the lenses of social, cultural, and political history, this book analyzes military records and government documents drawn from archives across four countries to uncover how these national formations were created in negotiations between the occupying powers and Latvian advocates. Utilizing first-person primary sources (

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9780198970842

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Harry C. Merritt is a historian of modern Europe, working on the social history of war and its consequences. He earned a Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 2020. From 2023 to 2025, Harry was a Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. In 2022, a chapter of his was published in Defining Latvia: Recent Explorations in History, Culture, and Politics (Central European University Press, 2022). Harry's work has also been published in Nationalities Papers, The Journal of Baltic Studies, REGION, and The Journal of Modern European History.

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